November 21, 2001

Ok, I am posting a day early but I have a lot of stuff done to the site that I wanted to let you know about since I posted yesterday. First of all, all of the pages have been updated to the new design and I think that all of the link problems have been eliminated. A number of the larger images have been modified so that they are not so large. This helps with how the site looks and it decreases the load times on some of these larger pages. For those of you with phone line connections, a single page on this site may take up to six minutes to load! And I understand that the site is not all that exciting. Make sure you check out our new video games section that now includes downloadable video games by our own house Loopy.

Canadian FlagMy friend Natalie in Canada informed me that she is from Burlington not Toronto and that that was like calling it Caledonia when it is Buffalo. I am not sure what she meant by that but we will go with it. I suppose it would be like confusing Burlington, Ontario with Burlington, Vermont. And you wouldn’t want to do that. That would be like confusing an sno-cone with Italian ice. Come to think of it, what is the difference between a sno-cone and Italian ice?

Happy Turkey Day everyone! I am signing off until after the festivities.

November 20, 2001

Today is a busy day. The Nimda virus was discovered on the machine used to create this web site (BigBird for those familiar with out network.) So today was spent doing virus checks on as many machines as we could. Our primary web server (the one that you are using now, as a matter of fact) checked out clean. We are very lucky.

Loopy has a new Nintendo Game Cube that he has been busy playing now. He has Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on it.

Tomorrow I am driving to Ohio to see my family for Thanksgiving so there will most likely not be an update until after the gang Thanksgiving Dinner at Tahou’s on Thursday night. I have been busy getting this site updated as quickly as possible. We are almost done. Not too much left to do.

Today, also, we are adding the new Video Game section complete with downloads of video games made right here in the Llama house.

November 19, 2001

Well, Nate, Josh, Joe and I are back from Toronto. Another year Marching in the Santa Claus Parade. The parade went well. It was fun as always. This year we got to play for a crew from GlobalTV that stopped by to film us in the staging area. That was really cool. So there might be a little special on us. We played Frosty the Snowman for GlobalTV. The weather was a bit warm for us, we were quite sweaty by the time that we were finished. But it is easier to play when you are warm, so that was good. The four of us drove up to Toronto separately from the rest of the band because Joe had to perform in a wedding on Saturday. So we waited for him and went up later in a rental car. I am not going to go into details but let me tell you, NEVER rent from Hertz. What a pain. All of the Llamas would like to say hi to Natalie who marched with us and is from the Toronto area!

I have had a bit of positive feedback on the new look of the site. It sounds like everyone likes the changes. I am definitely much happier with this than with the previous look. I did get the chance to do some more work on the site this morning. Nothing serious, just fixing a few things here and there. Tweaking, for the most part. I did reduce the size of the big Pacific Ocean picture on this page. That cleaned up the page a little bit and will speed up the download.

November 17, 2001

I have been hard at work getting the new look of SGL implemented for everyone. It takes a lot of work to get something this ambitious done. This is the most work that I have ever put into the look of the site. For now, all of the page design is still being done on Frontpage 2000 on my Windows 2000 computer but I check all of the pages using Mozilla 0.9.4. We did notice tonight that Internet Explorer has a parsing glitch and displays a small blue line next to some of our buttons. This is an IE problem and does not seem to occur in other browsers. I am not putting in extra work trying to compensate for Microsoft browsers. Sorry. Go Netscape. Go Opera. Whoo-hoo.

So, Dominica and I managed to get in to opening day of Harry Potter. I really enjoyed the book but I feel that the movie was a poor adaptation of it. I was fairly disappointed. With the incredible budget that they had and all of the hype, they should have been able to do a much better job than what they did. I think that the biggest shame was that so much of the feel of the book was lost. I understand that translating a book to the big screen is always a tremendous challenge but this seemed exceptionally poor, especially for a book that was shorter and so action oriented. Normally this type of literature lends itself well to the screen. The movie is surprisingly long, though, probably close to 140 minutes. It did not seem that long to me. Very easy to sit through. Oh well, now I am just looking forward to The Lord of the Rings. I have read the “Hobbit” all ready but have not actually read the Ring Trilogy. I know, I know, me of all people should have read it long ago. I will try to get out and read the book before I see the movie but that only gives me a couple of days so it will be quite the challenge.

I did manage to get one thing fixed on the site this evening as well. It seems that there was a picture on November 1 that was not working due to a problem with the file description. I think that that is fixed and working properly now. You can scroll down to that date and check out the picture. It is a good one, I think. Also I should mention, all of the images on this site are in the .PNG format. This format is free and does a wonderful job. I suggest that everyone use it! Our buttons are JPEGs just because the software that we use there does not produce .PNGs.

Well, I am off to Toronto today so I hope that you all enjoy the new look of the site (Loopy and Nate approved). Hopefully I can post again on Monday.

November 16, 2001

Well, it has been a pretty busy week and I have had to take a break from writing for a few days. I am back, however. Do not expect an update again until Monday because Josh, Nate, Joe and I are going to be in Toronto playing in the Santa Claus parade so I will be indisposed.

The weather is great here, in Ithaca, today. The sun is shining and there is a light breeze. Today is the big day that Harry Potter: Episode I releases in theatres. I already have my tickets for the 10:40pm showing at the Hoyt’s 8 at Pyramid Mall. Got them just after noon. This should be really good. I told you all that I was reading the first book in the series last week. Well, I managed to finish it (it doesn’t take all that long to read, really.) It was pretty good. It is fun to read. I am looking forward to reading the next books. I already own the first three books. Last week I had quite a bit of time to read so I also managed to read Issac Asimov’s “Foundation and Empire” and “Second Foundation”. Let me tell you, even if you aren’t a science fiction fan, you should try reading the Foundation series. They are really amazing books. You will never expect anything that happens. I really suggest reading them. I should also note that Dominica has been playing the new Harry Potter PC video game over the last week and is now addicted to it!

Yesterday, I took Phil to Soundworks in Rochester for the first time. It was his first exposure to a real high end audio shop. He walked away with a whole new theatre system! We got him set up with an Integra receiver and a full B&W speaker system. He is pretty happy. Everyone will be happy to know that the audiophiles have converted another one! (Resistance is futile!) I am hoping to be able to do some serious upgrading to my system pretty soon. I am going to trade in my Paradigm Studio Reference 80’s for some smaller B&W’s that make more sense for the places that I live in.

So the RX-7 is FINALLY out of the shop again. It has been sitting at the old house for the last two months waiting for someone to look at it. Nate, Bob and Loopy pushed it about three miles down to Varna where we got it into the shop. It is running now and is heading for Rochester to be winterized tomorrow. That will be the end of it until next year. I am still waiting on word about my 2002 PR5, I am hoping that it comes in soon. My Buick is on its last leg. A fuse blows all of the time so I have to drive with a beeping sound and no gauges. That is quite annoying.

Don’t forget that this week is Thanksgiving! Turkey day on Thursday. For all of you, who know who you are, the annual gang Thanksgiving dinner at Nick Tahou’s is still on. I am going to be in Ohio early that morning but will be driving straight to Rochester to meet everyone.

I am putting in some time working on the new look of Sheep Guarding Llama. I am doing the design in a program called the GIMP on Linux. I have never really worked with graphics before, and I have never really worked with this program at all. So, this is proving to be both a challenge and an educational experience. For anyone who wants to try out the GIMP, it is free and available on many platforms including UNIX, Linux and Windows. You can get your own free copy at www.GIMP.org. So far, I like it. But it is quite hard to use. So you will probably have to spend some serious time getting the hang of it. It was driving me crazy for a while. I am going to be looking for some feedback on how everyone likes the site once I start getting the changes up. Hopefully I can get something posted tonight.

In internet news today, Netscape Navigator has announced version 4.79 and Opera (Josh and my favorite browser) is beta testing version 6.0.